This poem of Old’s has been dubbed ‘formulaic’ by critics – it probably is – but given that she’s never spoken about her family, and so little is known about her personal life, it’s a valuable insight all the same. We can only assume by the theme and time-frame, it’s about her parents. Her poetry has been described as ‘morality plays’, to ‘pure fire in the hands, risky, on the verge of falling’…as well as rough, funny and grim. Born in 1942 to a ‘hellfire’ Calvinist family, she graduated from Stanford and then moved East to do a PhD at Columbia. She struggled a lot with her writing and didn’t get too it ‘seriously’ until her mid-late 30s. After nabbing her doctorate, she stood on the steps of the library at Columbia University and vowed to give up all that she learned at Columbia in order to write her own poems, even if they were bad. “No one knows what poetry is,” she later said in an award acceptance speech. “But each tribe has had it, there’s never been a group without it, it’s as necessary, as automatically there, as government or medicine. As a species, we seem to be in great need of imagining each other.” She’s published 11 volumes of poetry since 1980; the latest: One Secret Thing was published by Random House in 2008. Here she is reading two poems:

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About junecaldwell

June's short story collection Room Little Darker is published by New Island Books in May 2017. She's a prizewinner of The Moth International Short Story Prize and has been shortlisted and highly commended for many others including: Calvino Prize in Fabulist Fiction, Colm Toíbín International Short Story Award, Sunday Business Post/Penguin short story prize, Lorian Hemingway (USA), RTÉ Guide/Penguin Ireland and Over The Edge New Writer of the Year. In 2010 she received an Arts Council of Northern Ireland (ACNI) bursary for fiction. Her work has been showcased at the Italo-Irish Literature Exchange in Nogarole Rocca / Verona (May 2012), Read For The World (June 2012) and Bloomnibus (June 2013) at the Irish Writers' Centre, Galway Pro Choice (Aug 2013), Over the Edge Galway (Dec 2013), Stinging Fly Spring Launch (March 2014), At The Edge, Cavan (May 2014), The Winding Stair Prizewinner's Reading (Sep 2014), One City One Book: DLR Lexicon Barrytown Trilogy reading (April 2015), Hodges Figgis Book Festival (Oct 2015), Bogman's Canon Fiction Disco (Nov 2015, April 2016), Doolin Writers' Weekend (March 2016), Five Lamps Arts Festival (Mar 2016), National Concert Hall: Kevin Barry Recital Room series (April 2016) and the Eastrogen Rising: A Rebel Cabaret. Her creative writing has been published in Woven Tale Press, The Moth, The Stinging Fly, Literary Orphans and Popshot, as well as a non-fiction biography of a Trouble's moll with Gill and MacMillan in 2006. Her short story 'SOMAT' is published in The Long Gaze Back: The Anthology of Irish Women Writers, edited by Sinéad Gleeson/New Island. Journalism: The Gloss, The Guardian, The Observer, Sunday Times, Sunday Life, Sunday Tribune, Sunday Business Post, Sunday Independent, Ireland on Sunday, Irish Independent, as well as a number of women's magazines and trade journals.